Tag Archives: Highland Park

Moving Against Gun Violence

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Candlelight vigil for the 10th Annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence. All photos provided by Kyle Duff.

On Friday, December 16, our grandson Angel was attending a biology lab class at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he is currently aiming to lay the foundation for a health care career. In his first quarter in college, he has not yet established the exact contours of that career. His world is still full of possibilities.

While he was in class, someone else’s life possibilities came to an abrupt close. The 36-year-old driver of a car moving down West Jackson Boulevard, right in front of the Malcolm X campus, slammed into a tree after being shot in what police say was a gang-related shooting. His 29-year-old female passenger was taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition, having also been shot. She later died as well. The campus was placed on lockdown as police cars descended on the area, establishing a crime scene investigation and collecting evidence. We learned about it initially from Angel in a phone call. I checked online to find out what had happened.

That evening, I watched for more news. After all, Malcolm X is near downtown Chicago and less than a mile from a training center for the Chicago Police Department, also on Jackson. It is just two blocks from the United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks. It is near a major combination of hospitals, one affiliated with the University of Illinois at Chicago. On a Friday afternoon, this is a highly visible location.

But the event was superseded in journalistic importance that evening and in the next morning’s newspapers by a mass shooting at Benito Juarez High School that killed two students and wounded two others. To some, including this year’s Republican nominee for Illinois Governor, St. Sen. Darren Bailey, it probably helped justify his description during his recent losing campaign of Chicago as a “hellhole”—never mind Bailey’s long-standing opposition to gun control of all sorts. To others more aware of the larger social context, it provides more proof that the nation needs a better grip on the sale and ownership of firearms, including assault weapons. After all, Chicago is far from alone. In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died of gun-related injuries. Homicides from firearms have increased 14 percent over the past decade, while suicides by firearms have grown by 39 percent. We recently marked the tenth anniversary of the 2012 mass murder of dozens of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. What we have is a nationwide epidemic, in which two shootings in one day in a large city like Chicago are an increasingly common occurrence.

These occurrences are among many reasons the voices supporting meaningful gun control legislation, including a ban on assault weapons, are rapidly growing louder and more insistent. In fact, just a week ago, on Sunday evening, December 11, Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, on Chicago’s South Side, hosted the 10th Annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence. With indoor and outdoor displays of the

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot addresses the crowd.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin speaks to the audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

names and faces of more than 630 people killed in Chicago this year, the gathering included a representative of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who missed the event due to illness, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, among others. Many of those attending were survivors of gun violence including relatives and friends of those whose portraits were on display. Many also represented or spoke on behalf of organizations of survivors such as Mothers of Murdered Sons and Chicago Survivors.

The issue, as has long been the case, is how to turn the pervasive, ongoing grief into action that matters in the face of an obnoxious and defiant gun lobby. It is not that gun owners do not have some legitimate rights and the right to air a point of view, but that the leadership of the gun lobby has made so many so resistant to accepting facts or considering the impacts of their positions on thousands upon thousands of innocent victims. Their diversionary tactics, such as both Bailey and former President Trump painting Chicago as some sort of living hell (it is not; I live here and know otherwise) resulting from liberal values and hostility to police, are not only unhelpful but fail utterly to offer intelligent, evidence-based solutions to complex problems that are in no way aided by the free-flowing traffic of firearms across state borders and city limits. Say what they will, the mere fact that someone as troubled as Robert Crimo III was able to acquire both an Illinois Firearm Owner Identity (FOID) card and an assault weapon at the age of 19 is symptomatic of a gun culture that is blatantly out of control, and dozens of people attending a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, paid the price with their lives or with serious injuries. Yet the response of the gun lobby and its defenders fundamentally has been to double down on opposition to any reform of gun laws. Bailey, for instance, remains opposed to even having the state FOID requirement at all.

Forefront, Pastor Nancy Goede in the Augustana narthex.

But the momentum is shifting, the tide is turning.

At the federal level, Congress finally acted this past summer by passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which has been signed into law by President Joe Biden. Among other provisions, many related to mental health services, it expands background checks on gun buyers under 21, provides funding support for state red flag laws, and restricts straw gun purchases. It authorizes $750 million over five years for crisis intervention programs. The Wikipedia article linked at the beginning of this paragraph contains a full list of other appropriations established in the law, and explains the law in greater detail. Click here for a full text of the law, which resulted from multiple compromises between Republican and Democratic senators. The law does not come close to solving all gun-related problems, nor is any law likely to do so, but it is a step forward.

In Illinois, as of this date, action is pending on the Protect Illinois Communities Act, which would ban assault weapons in the state. The bill got a committee hearing in Springfield the day after the vigil at Augustana Lutheran Church. Bridging a gap that has often concerned activists against gun violence, the hearing brought forth as witnesses not only Lauren Bennett of Highland Park, a relatively affluent North Shore suburb of Chicago, but Conttina Phillips, a victim of Halloween gun violence in Garfield Park, a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. While the bill aims to ban assault weapons, Phillips advocated for further action against other types of guns because assault weapons are only one factor in the gang-related violence afflicting Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Sponsored by State Rep. Bob Morgan (D-Deerfield), who marched in the July 4 parade in Highland Park and represents that district, the bill aims to ban the sale, manufacture, or delivery of assault weapons and other high-caliber firearms in Illinois and would require current owners of such weapons to register that ownership with the state. It would extend current red flag restrictions from six months to one year. It would also bar the acquisition of a FOID card for anyone under 21 unless they are active in the military. Pritzker just the week before the hearing had called upon the General Assembly to pass and send to him such a bill before the anniversary of the Highland Park shooting.

We can only hope. Well, actually, we can do more. We can lobby our legislators. We can speak out. We can attend rallies. We can make clear that such action and more is long overdue.

Jim Schwab

Honoring Victims of Violence

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Guns: A Loaded Conversation, fabric art by Michele Makinen

At first, the music was minimal or even silent. Voices from the twelve-member Adrian Dunn Singers, spread across the back and sides of the sanctuary of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, simply announced a date in 2021, beginning on January 1, followed by the names of specific homicide victims of that day, mostly of gun violence. Steadily, they moved through the calendar year, each ten seconds in the score representing one day. Being the type of person who cranks numbers quickly in his head, I could not resist doing the calculation and determining that the pace stated in the program would consume just over an hour. A good length, I thought.

The weeks and months rolled by with the haunting music steadily asserting itself, but it was not lyrical. It sounded incantational, voices from the throat at various pitches as particular singers chimed in, based on troubadour melodies. This music induced, as my wife noted, meditative moods, or in my case, a growing and palpable sense of the waves of humanity slaughtered on the city’s streets and elsewhere, nearly 800 according to the Chicago Police Department, the worst year since 1994. For me, it was beyond a feeling of grief; it was an emotion that encompassed a profound sense of the waste of human lives, many of which never had the opportunity to contribute their talents to the city or our nation—just this gulf between what could have been and what we have become.

This July 23 premiere of “Memoria de Memoria,” a composition by composer Christophe Preissing, was requested by Rev. Nancy Goede, the parish pastor of Augustana, to honor the first anniversary of the death of Keith Cooper, 73, a member of Augustana killed last summer in a botched carjacking just two blocks away. Unanticipated was the punctuation of this year’s Chicago summer by the mass murder of seven people during a July 4 parade in nearby Highland Park, Illinois, a north shore suburb, in which about 30 other people were wounded, including an eight-year-old boy who now is paralyzed from the waist down. The alleged perpetrator, Robert Crimo III, was arrested later that night by police who found him in his car in Lake Forest. Highland Park, which quickly became the latest focus of national news on the problem of assault weapons and mass violence, will never be the same. There will always be before and after for Highland Park. For many violence-plagued neighborhoods in Chicago, however, there is always the frightening tension of now, of the gang that can’t shoot straight, of every day that we fail to get the guns off the streets and fail to find ways to give countless youths, many of them young Black men, some positive sense of purpose in life.

In the meantime, art can help us express our anger, our grief, our moral passion. That was the power of the Saturday evening presentation, of letting us experience all that emotionally through exquisitely crafted but distinctly unconventional music. Audience members had the opportunity to approach the altar, light memorial candles, and remember those whose memories they cherish as unique human beings whose light was extinguished prematurely through violence.

Readers may note in this blog post the absence of photos of the concert itself. It did not seem appropriate to shoot photos of or during the performance, although I share two that I took later and consider important. One shows the fabric art of Michele Makinen, who died of cancer earlier this year but lived in Chicago since 1974. “Guns: A Loaded Conversation” hung on the sanctuary wall, exhibiting the intricate workmanship Makinen brought to her response to the shooting of innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. The flag quilt became part of a traveling exhibit the following year.The other photograph shows the almost complete list of victims of violence in 2021 in the city of Chicago. I say “almost” because I was told it may not have included some people injured in late 2021 who died earlier this year after the poster was completed.

Let me just note, in closing, that the Hyde Park community and Augustana, in celebrating the life of Keith Cooper, whom I memorialized in a blog post a year ago, have created the Keith Cooper Fund to “provide monetary awards to promising young people between the ages of 16 and 26 who live in one of the neighborhoods of the near South Side of Chicago.” They may use the grants to seek training in a vocational or licensed trade; grow a startup business; or launch a career in jazz or other performing or fine arts. Keith Cooper represented all those aspirations and more, seeking to help those around him. Donations can be made online at www.augustanahydepark.org. You can contact the Keith Cooper Fund at keithcooperfund@gmail.com.

Jim Schwab